Thursday, October 05, 2006

Lostprophets - Start Something (Mp3 Download)

Review by Johnny Loftus @ allmusic.com
As sonically powerful as Start Something is, and as convincing as Lostprophets' earnest vocalizing and layered instrumental dynamics are, it's just so damn difficult to take the Welshmen seriously when every megabyte of their sonic output is a patent appropriation of the post-grunge movement's most salable proofs. Incubus, Hoobastank, and Linkin Park -- close your eyes and this is what you hear, these groups' defining characteristics jammed like shards of jagged glass into the soft Lostprophets loam. The Mike Patton scream Prophets vocalist Ian Watkins perfected on 2001's Fake Sound of Progress has -- like it did for Brandon Boyd and Doug Robb -- mellowed into a blandly earnest yawp capable of keeping things thick enough for the dudes but still rife with those heartfelt intakes of breath that the ladies love. (Check "Goodbye Tonight" for examples of both styles.) As for the music, Lostprophets' twin guitars are minced and sprinkled into an easily classifiable gruel of not-quite-metal, and the rhythm section just does what it's told. The title track's marriage of an orchestral lilt to its throaty riffing seems, at first, like a satisfactory tribute to the heavy heroics of Iron Maiden or even Dream Theater. But it's soon revealed as a micro-managed cut-and-paste job, its vocals, guitars, and double bass pound separated out and repositioned by the guiding hand of marketability. Single "Last Train Home" is similarly surgical in its precision anthemics. "To every broken heart in here," Watkins emotes over faraway plinks of piano, "Love was once a part but now it's disappeared." And with that, the song's thousand-foot wall of a chorus collapses, showering impossible puffballs of lighter-flicking, crowd-surfing rubble all over the radios of suburbia. Like A.F.I.'s "Girls Not Grey" -- which launched "FOLLOW!" and "SWALLOW!" into the modern rock stratosphere -- "Last Train Home" latches onto the phrase "But we sing," and repeats it 50 times in true pop single fashion. These blatant, market-conscious tweaks malign the majority of Start Something -- even the rousing "Burn, Burn," which would have otherwise rocked -- making one wonder whether producer Adam Valentine (at the helm for Good Charlotte's Young and the Hopeless) and Sony Music Entertainment are more worried about lost profits than Lostprophets.


Track Lists
01. We Still Kill The Old Way
02. To Hell We Ride
03. Last Train Home
04. Make a Move
05. Burn, Burn
06. I Don't Know
07. Hello Again
08. Goodbye Tonight
09. Start Something
10. A Million Miles
11. Last Summer
12. Sway

Death Cab For Cutie - Plans (Mp3 Download)

Review by Rob Theakston @ allmusic.com
For your consideration: a wildly successful indie rock band with a legion of followers on an equally successful, highly credible independent label makes the jump to major-label powerhouse Atlantic, leading to much chagrin and speculation among its fans as they awaited with bated breath for what would happen to the group. The result was For Your Own Special Sweetheart, inarguably the most polished and fully realized album of Dischord alumnus Jawbox's career. Fast forward ten years and you find Barsuk's Death Cab for Cutie in the same position, making the same move. A new label, a larger crowd (thanks to their repeated appearances on The OC), and a side project of Ben Gibbard (Postal Service) that very well overshadowed the success of his main project. All of the moves were perfectly aligned to take the little band that could into the rock stratosphere. But the difference between Jawbox and Death Cab for Cutie was that For Your Own Special Sweetheart went on to be the finest release of Jawbox's canon. Plans definitely comes close to that mark, but falls slightly short. In comparison to the dry, raw production of Transatlanticism, Plans is warm and polished, the kind of album expected from a band obsessed with the sound of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. Chris Walla does an amazing job bringing the group's sound in a different direction than before without compromising too many of the things that made the group sound great to begin with. Thematically, Plans is the Death Cab for Cutie suitable for graduate students, world-weary and wiser from their experiences, realizing they can no longer be love-starved 20-somethings without a clue yet hopelessly cursed to face the same issues. And there's merit to be had in acknowledging that maturity, for even blink-182 figured out their age and released their "serious" album. Gibbard's wispy, poetic lyrics (which could easily have been stolen from Aimee Mann's dressing room while she wasn't looking) still remain an artery from which the rest of the band beats and are some of his finest ever, but this time around the band aligns itself more with a series of emotional murmurs rather than a heart attack. The album winds its way from one ballad to the next, with brief stopovers at moderately up-tempo numbers to help break things up a bit. And it's this sense of resignation that either makes or breaks the album, depending on which Death Cab for Cutie is your favorite: the melancholic, hopeless romantic or the one who wears its heart on its sleeve with unbridled energy and passion. If Transatlanticism was Gibbard's Pet Sounds and Postal Service was SMiLE, then this is definitely Wild Honey, loved by adoring new fans and those who enjoy the ballads. But those hoping for a bit more -- for the bar to be raised higher -- might find this a mildly predictable exercise in Gibbard exorcising the demons of Phil Collins that haunt him. Plans is both a destination and a transitional journey for the group, one that sees the fulfillment of years of toiling away to develop their ideas and sound. But it's with the completion of those ideas that band is faced with a new set of crossroads and challenges to tread upon: to stay the course and suffer stagnation or try something bold and daringly new with their future. Which road they'll take will make all the difference.


Track Lists
01. Marching Bands Of Manhattan
02. Soul Meets Body
03. Summer Skin
04. Different Names For The Same Thing
05. I Will Follow You Into The Dark
06. Your Heart Is An Empty Room
07. Someday You Will Be Loved
08. Crooked Teeth
09. What Sarah Said
10. Brother On A Hotel Bed
11. Stable SOng

José González - Veneer (Mp3 Download)

Review by Tim Sendra @ allmusic.com
Don't let the name fool you; singer/songwriter José González is a Swedish-born and -raised son of Argentine parents. His debut album, Veneer, is a striking collection of hushed and autumnal indie pop bedroom songs that reside on the hi-fi end of the lo-fi spectrum. González is definitely a member of the "quiet is the new loud" school as founded by Elliott Smith and the Kings of Convenience. Veneer is about as intimate as they come; it sounds like he is sitting right on the end of your bed singing just for you. At times, González is a little more forceful than most of his schoolmates, often working himself into a tightly spinning ball of emotion (as on the driving "Lovestain" and the bluesy "Hints"). At these moments his voice is reminiscent of Mark Kozelek, only without the wild flights of pretension. Mostly though, he is content to cruise along on mellow vocals double-tracked behind gently plucked and strummed acoustic guitars. The beautiful "Heartbeats," "Deadweight on Velveteen," and the gently rollicking "Stay in the Shade" are the high watermarks of a remarkably focused and promising debut. González is a welcome addition to the q-school of indie pop.


Track Lists
01. Slow Moves
02. Remain
03. Lovestain
04. Heartbeats
05. Crosses
06. Deadweight On Velveteen
07. All You Deliver
08. Stay In The Shade
09. Hints
10. Save Your Day
11. Broken Arrows

The Used - In Love And Death (Mp3 Download)

Review by Johnny Loftus @ allmusic.com
The Used's In Love and Death is their official sophomore album, following the tide over hodgepodge of 2003's Maybe Memories. They've found some harder guitars in the interim, filling "Take It Away" and 'I Caught Fire" with directly energizing chord progressions that spill over rewardingly into triumphant choruses. "Away" even revitalizes the ridiculously played-out singing guy/screaming guy dynamic that the Used and so many of their peers unfailingly deploy. The rest of In Love and Death plays directly to the bruised souls and bleeding hearts of tortured teenage scribblers everywhere, incorporating emo/punk revivalist genre touchstones like tortured/sweet vocals, jarring time shifts, and elaborately-layered production techniques. Overall it's a promising effort from the Used.




Track Lists

01. Take It Away
02. I Caught Fire
03. Let It Bleed
04. All That I've Got
05. Cut Up Angels
06. Listening
07. Yesterday's Feelings
08. Light With A Sharpened Edge
09. Sound Effects And Overdramatic
10. Hard To Say
11. Lunacy Fringe
12. I'm A Fake

The Killers - Sam's Town (Mp3 Download)

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine @ allmusic.com
Not even the Killers, the champions of retro new wave, think that synth rock is music to be taken seriously, and Lord knows that this Vegas quartet wants to be taken seriouslya-- it's a byproduct of being taken far too seriously in the first place, a phenomenon that happened to the Killers after their not-bad-at-all 2004 debut album, Hot Fuss, was dubbed as the beginning of the next big thing by legions of critics and bloggers, all searching for something to talk about in the aftermath of the White Stripes and the Strokes. The general gist of the statement was generally true, at least to the extent that they were a prominent part of the next wave, the wave where new wave revivalism truly caught hold. They were lighter than Interpol and far gaudier, plus they were fronted by a guy called Brandon Flowers, a name so ridiculous he had to be born with it (which he was). And although it was hailed to the heavens on various areas of the Net, Hot Fuss became a hit the old-fashioned way: listeners gravitated toward it, drawn in by "Mr. Brightside" and sticking around for the rest. Soon, they made the cover of everything from Spin to Q, earning accolades from rock stars and seeing their songs covered on Rock Star, too. Heady times, especially for a group with only one album to its name, and any band that receives so much attention is bound to be thought of as important, since there has to be a greater reason for all that exposure than because Flowers is pretty, right? One of the chief proponents of the belief that the Killers are important is the band itself, which has succumbed to that dreaded temptation for any promising band on its sophomore album: they've gone and grown beards. Naturally, this means they're serious adults now, so patterning themselves after Duran Duran will no longer do. No, they make serious music now, and who else makes serious music? Why, U2, of course, and Bruce Springsteen, whose presence looms large over the Killers' second album, Sam's Town.

The ghosts of Bono and the Boss are everywhere on this album. They're there in the artful, grainy Anton Corbijn photographs on the sleeve, and they're there in the myth-making of the song titles themselves -- and in case you didn't get it, Flowers made sure nobody missed the point prior to the release of Sam's Town, hammering home that he's just discovered the glories of Springsteen every time he crossed paths with the press. Flowers' puppy love for Bruce fuels Sam's Town, as he extravagantly, endlessly, and blatantly apes the Springsteen of the '70s, mimicking the ragged convoluted poet of the street who mythologized mundane middle-class life, turning it into opera. The Killers sure try their hardest to do that here, marrying it to U2's own operatic take on America, inadvertently picking up on how the Dublin quartet never sounded more European than when they were trying to tell one and all how much they loved America. That covers the basic thematic outlook of the record, but there's another key piece of the puzzle of Sam's Town: it's named after a casino in the Killers' home town of Las Vegas, and it's not one of the gleeful, gaudy corporate monstrosities glutting the Strip, but rather one located miles away in whatever passes for regular, everyday Vegas -- in other words, it's the city that lies beneath the sparkling façade, the real city. Of course, there's no real city in Vegas -- it's all surface, it's a place that thinks that a miniature Eiffel Tower and a fake CBGB's is every bit as good as being there -- and that's the case with the Killers too: when it comes down to it, there's no there there -- it's all a grand act. Every time they try to dig deeper on Sam's Town -- when they bookend the album with "enterlude" and "exitlude," when Flowers mixes his young-hearts-on-the-run metaphors, when they graft Queen choirs and Bowie baritones onto bridges of songs -- they just prove how monumentally silly and shallow they are. Which isn't necessarily the same thing as bad, however. True, this album has little of the pop hooks of "Mr. Brightside," but in its own misguided way, it's utterly unique. Yes, it's cobbled together from elements shamelessly stolen from Springsteen, U2, Echo & the Bunnymen, Bowie, Queen, Duran Duran, and New Order, but nobody on earth would have thought of throwing these heroes of 1985 together, because they would have instinctively known that it wouldn't work. But not the Killers! They didn't let anything stop their monumental misconception; they were able to indulge to their hearts' content -- even hiring U2/Depeche Mode producers Alan Moulder and Flood to help construct their monstrosity, which gives their half-baked ideas a grandeur to which they aspire but don't deserve. But even if the music doesn't really work, it's hard not to listen to it in slack-jawed wonderment, since there's never been a record quite like it -- it's nothing but wrong-headed dreams, it's all pomp but no glamour, it's clichés sung as if they were myths. Every time it tries to get real, it only winds up sounding fake, which means it's the quintessential Vegas rock album from the quintessential Vegas rock band.


Track Lists
01. Sam's Town
02. Enterlude
03. When You Were Young
04. Bling Confessions Of A King
05. For Reasons Unknown
06. Read My Mind
07. Uncle Johnny
08. Bones
09. My List
10. This RIver Is Wild
11. Why Do I Keep Counting
12. Exitlude
13. Where The White Boys Dance [Bonus Track]
14. All The Pretty Face [Bonus Track]

Marit Larsen - Under The Surface (Mp3 Download)

Review by Anonymous Person
When you first start listening to Marit Larsen’s CD Under the Surface, you picture a shy young girl, peeking out from around a corner. You know that you’re only seeing a bit of what she has to offer. The more you listen, the more you realize just how intriguing both Larsen and her music really are. And then you just can’t wait to find out exactly what else she has up her sleeve.

Under the Surface is the aptly-titled debut solo CD from this extraordinary young Norwegian. At just 22 years old, Larsen has created an album that is both beautiful and playful – and that also reveals a maturity far beyond her years. Not surprising, considering that she has already held her own in the rough-and-tumble world of the music business for a decade.

Larsen released her first album together with her childhood friend Marion Raven at the age of 12. That release (a children’s album) was nominated for Norway’s equivalent to the Grammy, and by the time she was 13 Larsen was inspired to turn her considerable talents to songwriting. “I got ideas everywhere – every conversation could become a song,” she says. Those songs and her love of all things musical led to her and Raven to form the band M2M. When M2M was signed to Atlantic Records, Larsen found herself a worldwide star at the tender age of 16.

The shy, young girl with the great big talent has blossomed into a very rare flower, indeed.


Track Lists
01. In Came The Light
02. Under The Surface
03. Don't Save Me
04. Only A Fool
05. Solid Ground
06. This Time Tomorrow
07. Recent Illusion
08. The Sinking Game
09. To An End
10. Come Closer
11. Poison Passion

Röyksopp - The Understanding (Mp3 Download)

Review by John Bush @ allmusic.com
When the Norwegian production duo Röyksopp dropped their first album, Melody A.M., it sounded as though they were on a stopover from another planet. Otherworldly samples and a crisp production sense combined to make the singles "Eple" and "Sparks" perfect examples of the downbeat form and near-ubiquitous inclusions on chillout compilations. As electronica artists from Biosphere to Boards of Canada had proved before them, a life away from the mainstream -- say, in the extreme northern climes of Europe -- was easily capable of freeing an artist from the demands of trendiness. Their second album, The Understanding, reveals a different focus: fascination with all manner of radio-ready European dance. Yes, Röyksopp are all grown up now. In their quest for maturity (as well as the ears of busy shoppers all over the Northern Hemisphere), the duo changed their distinctive sound in the process. The single "Only This Moment," a post-connubial duet between male and female, could perhaps have heralded the comeback of a middle-aged Aqua, while on "49 Percent" the duo struggle to emulate Underworld's "Pearls' Girl" (while a bewitching vocal from Chelonis R. Jones rescues them from the brink). Nods to synth pop (Depeche Mode, Soft Cell), disco (Moroder), and electronica (Daft Punk, Boards of Canada) simply accentuate the overall mood, that Röyksopp have little left to say aside from what others have said more clearly in the past.


Track Lists
01. Triumphant
02. Only This Moment
03. 49 Percent
04. Sombre Detune
05. Follow My Ruin
06. Beautiful Day Without You
07. What Else Is There
08. Circuit Breaker
09. Alpha Male
10. Someone Like Me
11. Dead To The World
12. Tristesse Globale

AFI - Sing The Sorrow (MP3 Download)

Review by Johnny Loftus @ allmusic.com
Sing the Sorrow, their DreamWorks debut, isn't the wholesale departure from AFI's roots that some longtime fans griped about. It is merely the next step on a path that began with 1999's Black Sails in Sunset, the first album to feature guitarist Jade Puget. Assuming the role of principal songwriter, Puget wrapped vocalist Davey Havok's gothic tendencies in songs that put a finer point on the aggressive hardcore of AFI's earlier material, and massaged hooks from a morass of crashing rhythm, punk rock riffs, and Havok's opaque lyrics. The backing of DreamWorks meant that AFI could now hire major-league production to tweak what Puget had started. And they did. Work on AFI's major-label bow began in August of 2002 at L.A.'s Cello Studios, with Butch Vig (Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins) and Jerry Finn (Green Day, Rancid) at the helm. Emerging in early 2003 with Sing the Sorrow, it's clear the molting process AFI began with Black Sails in Sunset is complete. Vig and Finn kept the band's nucleus of pummeling California hardcore but stretched the songs lengthwise to incorporate greater lyrical introspection for Havok and even more attention to melody than on previous efforts. Oscillating between churning verses and intersecting solos and riffs, "The Great Disappointment" is like junior-varsity Fugazi, while the heroic emo chord changes of "This Celluloid Dream" transform Havok's preening wail into a sensitive croon, and single "Girls Not Grey" is a car-radio singalong of pure genius. It's true that the anthemic backing vocal choruses of material like "Girls Not Grey" and "Bleed Black" make the songs more pop than hardcore or even Havok's beloved goth. And the distorted synth and drum programming on "Silver and Cold" and "Death of Seasons" is a cheeky production trick that isn't very successful when married to the songs' upbeat choruses. But neither the producers nor the band went overboard. Just when the strings, piano, and rainstorm effects threaten to turn Sing the Sorrow into a My Dying Bride album, there is a burst of hardcore like "Dancing Through Sunday" to recall California pioneers of the genre like Dead Kennedys or SST transplants Hüsker Dü. Whatever factions of the band's longterm fans might think of their major-label affiliation, Sing the Sorrow represents a coalescing of the band's sound. And that's fine with AFI. "People have always either hated us or loved us," guitarist Puget told MTV.com. "And the reactions tend to be pretty extreme on both sides, but the hatred is just as cool because people are actually reacting. It's either, 'F*ck those guys,' or 'I f*ckin' love AFI. They rock.'


Track Lists
01. Miseria Cantare - The Beginning
02. The Leaving Song, Part 2
03. Bleed Black
04. Silver And Cold
05. Dancing Through Sunday
06. Girl's Not Grey
07. Death Of Seasons
08. The Great Disappointment
09. Paper Airplanes (Makeshift Wings)
10. This Celluloid Dream
11. The Leaving Song
12. ...But Home Is Nowhere

Monday, October 02, 2006

Jack Johnson And Friends - Curious George: Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies (Mp3 Download)

Review by James Christopher Monger @ allmusic.com
Perennial surfer dude/singer/songwriter Jack Johnson lends his voice to the eternally silent Curious George on this collection of "Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies," original material built around the famous monkey and his strange obsession with "the Man with the Yellow Hat." Universal Pictures couldn't have picked a better collaborator for this soundtrack to the Curious George film, as Johnson's easygoing delivery and breezy demeanor match George's silent curiosity to a T. Fellow songwriters Ben Harper, G. Love, and Matt Costa contribute three songs to the predominantly children-oriented affair, while Johnson and band give up an island rendition of the White Stripes' "We're Going to Be Friends," as well as the umpteenth cover of Schoolhouse Rock!'s "Three Is the Magic Number." Heady stuff? Not exactly, but there's not an ounce of pretense to the project, making it a fun, safe bet for kids and a forgettable -- yet not entirely unpleasant -- piece of escapism for adults.


Track Lists
01. Upside Down
02. Broken
03. People Watching
04. Wrong Turn
05. Talk Of The Town
06. Jungle Gym
07. Were Going To Be Friends
08. The Sharing Song
09. The 3 R's
10. Lullaby
11. With My Own Two Hands
12. Questions
13. Supposed To Be

Amos Lee - Supply And Demand (Mp3 Download)

Review by Matt Collar @ allmusic.com
On the title track to his sophomore effort Supply And Demand, singer/songwriter Amos Lee sings, "Baby I need a plan to help me understand, that life ain't only supply and demand." If the supply and demand Lee is referring to is money, success and power -- and it clearly is -- then the stuff he truly values here is the currency of freedom, love and sympathy for your fellow man. It's just such yin yang subject matter that has driven folk-singers to set struggle to melody ever since Depression-era scufflers like Woody Guthrie pointed out how America was technically "made for you and me" and not just them in the nice suits. For the most part, Lee is on about the same stuff here although his vantage point is the more stylish, if no less lonely, tour bus and not a dust bowler's flat-bed truck. Nonetheless, Lee is a heartfelt songwriter with an R&B crooner's sense of romance and drama and a real knack for turning his own ennui into anthems for the average guy. He tackles wars of various stripes on "Freedom" and like John Mayer's "Waiting On The World To Change", the song finds Lee deftly threading the political needle with lines like, "Don't want to blame the rich for what they got or point a finger at the poor for what they have not" and, "freedom is seldom found by beatin' someone to the ground." It's a catchy, stump speech of a tune and, three songs in, lifts the album up from just pleasant into something truly welcome and unexpected. Similarly engaging is the sanguine, slow ballad "Careless" which mixes The Band's "The Night We Drove Old Dixie Down" and Crosby, Stills & Nash's "Helpless" into a gut-wrenching and artful self-indictment of infidelity. However, it's the low-key and darkly sweet "Night Train" that should remain as not just the album's best cut, but Lee's signature song. Hypnotically simple, the song hangs on the chorus with Lee's candid omission, "I've been workin' on a night train/Drinkin' coffee, takin' cocaine/I'm out here on my night train/Tryin' to get her safely home." It's a hushed, rhythmically propulsive song filled with dramatic tension that is beautifully colored by shimmers of organ and lush guitars. On an album all about what we've bought and sold, both personally and collectively, it shows how in tune Lee is with this land of ours and how good he is at selling his soul in the best possible way.


Track Lists
01. Shout Out Loud
02. Sympathize
03. Freedom
04. Careless
05. Skipping Stone
06. Supply And Demand
07. Sweet Pea
08. Night Train
09. Southern Girl
10. The Wind
11. Long Line Of Pain

Maroon 5 - Songs About Jane (Mp3 Download)

Review by MacKenzie Wilson @ allmusic.com
The boys of Maroon 5 have certainly come a long way since their days in the indie outfit Kara's Flowers. After the band's demise in 1999, frontman Adam Levine surrounded himself with New York City's urban hip-hop culture and found a new musical calling. Maroon 5 was born and their debut album, Songs About Jane, illustrates an impressive rebirth. It's groovy in spots, offering bluesy funk on "Shiver" and a catchy, soulful disposition on "Harder to Breathe." "Must Get Out" slows things down with its dreamy lyrical story, and Levine is a vocal dead ringer for Men at Work's Colin Hay. Don't wince -- it works brilliantly. Songs About Jane is love-drunk on what makes Maroon 5 tick as a band. They're not as glossy as the Phantom Planet darlings; they've got grit and a sexy strut, personally and musically. It's much too slick to cross over commercially in 2002, but it's good enough for the pop kids to take notice.


Track Lists
01. Harder To Breathe
02. This Love
03. Shiver
04. She Will Be Loved
05. Tangled
06. The Sun
07. Must Get Out
08. Sunday Morning
09. Secret
10. Through With You
11. Not Coming Home
12. Sweetest Goodbye

Keane - Under The Iron Sea (Mp3 Download)

Review by MacKenzie Wilson @ allmusic.com
In the two years since releasing their debut album Hopes and Fears, Keane has quickly established itself an integral part of the mainstream rock canon. Hit singles such as "Somewhere Only We Know," "Bedshaped," and "Everything's Changing" made Hopes and Fears a transatlantic hit, earning the trio two Brit Awards, a Grammy nomination, and a host of sold-out world tours. They're as likeable and as accessible as Coldplay yet Keane's return isn't as buoyant as their initial introduction. Whereas Hopes and Fears faced uncertainty head on with joyous enthusiasm, Under the Iron Sea is a darker, less romantic set of songs affected by a disenchanted outlook on life and the world's problems. Keane feels the frustration of a world torn apart by war, but also expresses their own growing pains as a group. Songs such as the grayish ebb and flow of "A Bad Dream" and "Crystal Ball" connect with such reflections. Frontman Tom Chaplin faces the disappointment of growing older on the haunting "Atlantic," another stone-cold gem of synthesizer strings and Tim Rice-Oxley's gorgeous piano delivery. When you think it might be totally depressing, there are some hints of life hidden in the corners of Under the Iron Sea and these mysterious loops highlight Keane's new sonic experiments. Thus far they've existed without guitars. Though the bounty of this record breathes with a collection of various analog synths and an old electric piano, Rice-Oxley's usual performance is now enhanced with a bevy of guitar effect pedals. Debut single "It Is Any Wonder?" is layered with pianos and Chaplin cries out, "Stranded in the wrong time/Where love is just a lyric in a children's rhyme, a soundbite." Such words capture how crucial it was for Keane to come up with something that's tangible and thought-provoking, but the guitar pedals are just a bit too dramatic. Keane should be applauded for going after a different sound; there's no harm in that, but die-hard fans might rush to judge Under the Iron Sea as sounding a bit too much like U2.


Track Lists
01. Atlantic
02. Is It Any Wonder
03. Nothing In My Way
04. Leaving So Soon
05. A Bad Dream
06. Hamburg Song
07. Put It Behind You
08. Crystal Ball
09. Try Again
10. Broken Toy
11. The Frog Prince

Disturbed - Ten Thousand Fists (Mp3 Download)

Review by Johnny Loftus @ allmusic.com
It started in 2000 with "Down with the Sickness." Disturbed's thick, rhythmic take on alt-metal was perfect music for stalking bloody zombies, and vocalist David Draiman's jaw-snapping Pavlovian grunts made the trigger fingers of first-person shooters itch. There were threads of other groups in the sound -- Pantera's wrenching power, Slipknot, the ill-lighted parlor games of Tool. But Disturbed held their own from the start, so get up, come on get down with the sickness. If 2002's Believe downplayed Draiman's guttural responses a little, that tact's long gone for 2005's Ten Thousand Fists. From Todd McFarlane's evocative wronged misfits artwork -- Suicide Girls stand fists upraised next to ghoulish fiends and disenfranchised truckers -- to the rousing staccato of the title track and the "Sickness" rewrite "Stricken," Disturbed solidify their stance as the black knights of gaming-console rock. Creepy electronics slither behind Dan Donegan's guitar, and he mostly forsakes soloing to concentrate on the visceral groove. When he's not hacking like a chained-up pit bull, Draiman emotes from the valley of reverb (that's next to the valley of death), and his moments of epic roar make the songs' choppier parts more effective. Now, "Overburdened" takes the epic stuff a little too far. Draiman starts off the song in narration, muttering "Fate is so unkind" like a monster who's been given the power to feel. But even in its swirling pretentiousness, you can't deny his intensity. Luckily the majority of Fists sticks to mid-tempo punishers that pound back anger-gritted teeth and no anesthesia. (Remember, Disturbed's tours are underwritten by Jägermeister, the black licorice firewater that punches Saturday night in the face.) "Deify" rails against blind devotion to political leaders and "Sons of Plunder" stalks at a faster, more aggressive faster heart rate, while "Decadence" and "Sacred Lie" drop into the rhythmic grip that by mid- to late album is almost comfortable in its gloomy thump. (Disturbed's ill-advised cover of Genesis' "Land of Confusion"? No comment.) Ten Thousand Fists does start to sound the same after a while. But those bloody zombies aren't going to stop pouring though the doorway, so it's a good thing it has at least 12 burly alt-metal rockers. Fire!


Track Lists
01. Ten Thousand Fists
02. Just Stop
03. Guarded
04. Deify
05. Stricken
06. I'm Alive
07. Sons Of Plunder
08. Overburdened
09. Decadence
10. Forgiven
11. Land Of Confusion
12. Sacred Lie
13. Pain Redefined
14. Avarice